I heard about the Crackpot Index on last week's This American Life. John Baez (a mathematical physicist) uses it to rate "potentially revolutionary contributions to physics" such as proofs that special relativity is misguided, and so on. Assign yourself points for each statement that describes your theory. The more points you get, the more loony you are.

For example,

10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".

10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

Some of the more general statements might apply to Perl (or programming, really).

1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.

10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

20 points for naming something after yourself.

40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.

Can we expand the list? I know Perl has had it share of cranks (maybe more than other languages?) and they usually are loony in the same way. Without assigning absolute points (we'd have to rank things against each other and we don't have the whole list yet), what's on Perl's list? Note, a perfectly reasonable project or idea might match a couple points, but that doesn't make it loony. A true loon with match many points at the same time.